Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

In the menagerie of great nineteenth-century thinkers, Nietzsche is the most dangerous blond beast of them all. He combines the withering pessimism of Schopenhauer with the joyful life-affirmation of Heine. Much of his writing is an act of devotion towards great men, starting with Richard Wagner. When Wagner disappointed him, he turned his attention to Goethe, Socrates, Jesus Christ and the Greek god Dionysus.

Alexander Nehamas, in Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1985), argues that Nietzsche is not a moralist at all, but a thinker who views life as an artistic endeavour. As Nietzsche puts it in Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (Leipzig, 1872, p. 25) (The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music): ‘denn nur als aesthetisches Phänomen ist das Dasein und die Welt ewig gerechtfertigt’ (‘existence in the world is only ever justified as an aesthetic phenomenon’). If we take this seriously, then we should probably understand Nietzsche as an art critic, not as a philosopher. Certainly, Nietzsche was an art worshipper in the tradition of Friedrich Schlegel and Jacob Burkhardt. Full of contradictions (like most people), he denounced Christianity but had great respect for Jesus Christ; he disliked metaphysics but adored Socrates; he despised German nationalism but affirmed his so-called ‘Aryan’ origins, naming his Zarathustra after an Iranian prophet.

Nietzsche is a compelling stylist, as Sarah Kofman has shown (see reading list below). Trained in Greek rhetoric and the exquisitely barbed essays of Heine, he understood writing primarily as a form of mortal combat. As he wrote in Ecce Homo (1888), ‘Warum ich so klug bin’ (‘Why I am so clever’), paragraph 4:

Den höchsten Begriff vom Lyriker hat mir Heinrich Heine gegeben. Ich suche umsonst in allen Reichen der Jahrtausende nach einer gleich süssen und leidenschaftlichen Musik. Er besass jene göttliche Bosheit, ohne die ich mir das Vollkommene nicht zu denken vermag, – ich schätze den Werth von Menschen, von Rassen, darnach ab, wie nothwendig sie den Gott nicht abgetrennt vom Satyr verstehen wissen. – Und wie er das Deutsche handhabt! Man wird einmal sagen, dass Heine und ich bei weitem die ersten Artisten der deutschen Sprache gewesen sind.

It was Heinrich Heine who gave me the most perfect idea of what a lyric poet could be. In vain do I search through all empires of the millennia [allen Reichen der Jahrtausende] for anything to resemble his sweet and passionate music. He possesses that divine malice without which I cannot imagine perfection – I consider the value of men, of races, according to the extent to which they cannot conceive of a god who is apart from the satyr. – And how he employs German! It will one day be said that Heine and I have been by far the first artists of the German language.

(Notice here the rhetoric of the thousand-year Reich, which the Nazis later appropriated. The Nazis stole many of Nietzsche’s best lines, much as they looted the countries they invaded.)

Nietzsche, the Gentile counterpart of Heine, shares Heine’s allegiance to Spinoza and Goethe, and his distrust of modern political parties. Yet Heine chose to make his home among the people of Paris, while Nietzsche withdrew to the lonely paths of Swiss Alps, and later to the Alpine foothills in northern Italy. The difference is telling.

Nietzsche’s political ideal was the ancient Laws of Manu, Manusmṛiti (Sanskrit: मनुस्मृति) which sets out the Hindu caste system. In an alternative universe, Nietzsche might have become friends with Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941); he might have taken up a Professorship at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, where the caste system might have suited his aristocratic tastes.

One of Nietzsche’s earliest critics was Max Nordau (1849-1923). Nordau’s Entartung (Degeneration, 1892), Book 3, Chapter 5, is a tirade against Nietzsche which describes him as an egomaniac and a sadist, and his admirers as ‘simpletons drunk with sonorous words’ (see reading list below, Nordau, p. 451 and p. 469). Ironically, the ideas of both Nietzsche and Nordau were later perverted by the Nazis.

From 1890 to the present day, Nietzsche’s writings have been weaponized in political struggles and debates. In The Persistence of the Old Regime (1981), Arno J. Mayer argues that in the late nineteenth century Nietzsche became ‘the chief minstrel’ in the battle between European feudal elites and modern political democracy (see reading list below, Mayer, p. 285). He points out that ‘Nietzsche was prepared to enslave the rest of mankind in the pursuit of high culture, to which he assigned absolute priority’ (p. 286). According to Mayer:

‘Between 1890 and 1914 social Darwinist and Nietzschean formulas permeated the upper reaches of polity and society. Because of their antidemocratic, elitist, and combative inflection they were ideally suited to help the refractory elements of the ruling and governing classes raise up and intellectualize their deep-seated and ever-watchful illiberalism. [...] Clearly, social Darwinist and Nietzschean ideas did not express a revolt against the liberal state and bourgeois society. Rather, they embodied and fostered the recomposition of those conservative forces in the ancien régime that were determined to block all further liberal and democratic advances or to dismantle some that had been realized in the recent past.’ (p. 290)

****

Nietzsche’s influence on modern German literature is huge, for example on the Expressionist dramas of Georg Kaiser, and on Expressionist poetry – see the anthology Menschheitsdämmerung (1919) (Twilight of Humanity), ed. by Kurt Pinthus. Attentive readers of Nietzsche included Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Hermann Hesse, Carl Gustav Jung and Frank Wedekind.

Arguably, though, the most profound reception of Nietzsche can be found in the works of the Austrian modernists: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Oskar Kokoschka, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard.

An early classic of Nietzsche scholarship in English is Erich Heller’s The Disinherited Mind (1961), which considers Nietzsche in relation to Goethe, Burckhardt and Rilke.

English Translations

The best translations of Nietzsche into English are by R. J. (Reginald John) Hollingdale (1930-2001), published by Penguin Books. Hollingdale also wrote an excellent biography of Nietzsche. An obituary for R. J. Hollingdale, written by the Nietzsche scholar Carol Diethe, is available here.

See also The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, 19 volumes, ed. and trans. by Alan D. Schrift, Duncan Large, and Adrian Del Caro, available here from Stanford University Press.